“Then we stopped a well-dressed Frenchman, and said to him, ‘_Monsieur, où est la Bastille?_’ The fellow was too polite to laugh in our faces, as the conductor did, but he said not a word, and walked off. I saw, though, when his back was turned towards us, that he was shaking his sides, and evidently grinning. “Then we stepped into the restaurant, and I said to a waiter, ‘_Garçon, où est la Bastille?_’ and that infernal waiter laughed in my face. I said to the other boys, ‘These confounded Frenchmen round the Bastille are all fools. I thought Frenchmen were polite, but these fellows have no politeness at all.’ We climbed out of that restaurant, and went out on the square on a Bastille hunt. “There was no more sign of a prison than there is inside your boot. We walked round that square about ten minutes, when it got into one of our heads,—not into mine though,—that the Bastille had been destroyed in 1789. I had nothing more to say, except that we were the three biggest fools in all Paris. Here we had been hunting round, boring everybody, and asking them to show us a prison which was destroyed eighty years before, as we perfectly well knew, only we did not happen to recollect it. We went back to the Grand Hotel, and the next time we went out sight-seeing we made sure that the thing we inquired for was in existence.” [Sidenote: DESCRIPTION OF THE BASTILLE.] The Bastille was an irregular building in shape, as the original construction, in the time of Charles V. had been added to by each successive monarch. It had as its principal feature eight round towers, connected by curtains of masonry, and was encircled by a ditch a hundred and twenty-five feet wide. This ditch was generally dry, and was surrounded on its outside by a wall sixty feet high, to which was attached a wooden gallery running round the whole inner circumference of the ditch opposite the castle. This gallery was called the “Rounds.” Sentinels were stationed on these Rounds, and it was their duty to be perpetually in motion, in order to discover any movement of the prisoners for escaping. The Bastille had a governor and a staff of assistants, and it had a garrison of one hundred men, with their proper officers. Whenever a prisoner was brought to the Bastille, his trunks and clothing were carefully examined, in order to discover whether he had any concealed papers or weapons. The advocate Linguet, who had been detained there for three years, says,—